


Gazes Into You

by misura



Category: Sunshine (2007)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 23:21:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four years, seven months and five days after the <i>Icarus II</i> has left Earth, Capa comes back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gazes Into You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HopefulNebula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopefulNebula/gifts).



> this movie is a bit hard on its characters, especially when one wants to write post-movie fic, and while it did seem wildly unlikely even Capa would survive the ending, his survival did seem like it might require less reality-bending than, say, Corazon's.
> 
> so I bent reality a bit and put Capa on the Icarus III (which couldn't possibly have been built, actually) and brought him back home and made more bad things happen to him, because apparently, that's what you do with favorite characters? um.

Four years, seven months and five days after the _Icarus II_ has left Earth, Capa comes back.

Against all odds, he is not dead.

(He does not feel alive, either.)

 

There are a lot of doctors. Capa tries to remember their names at first, tries to keep faces and names matched together in his head, but the faces all blur together and he finds the way people look at him when he gets their name wrong much more uncomfortable than when he doesn't even try at all.

(He feels that this isn't right, that _trying_ should get a more positive reaction and evaluation than _not trying_ but then, he is a physicist, not a psychologist.)

They tell him he has some sort of gene that makes him more resistant to sunlight, to heat.

He doesn't tell them he knows of at least one man with (probably) that same gene, who survived an exposure that should have been lethal, on an empty spaceship, for six years. (At night, alone, he prays Pinbacker's madness came from being alone, from the heat, that it will not happen to him.)

They tell him he is very lucky.

He tries not to flinch at what stares back at him from his bathroom mirror. (He will probably never need to shave again in his life. Small blessings.)

 

Earth is warming up again, slowly. Steadily.

It's a fascinating process to bear witness to, from a scientific point of view.

“Am I a prisoner here?” he asks one of his doctors, _here_ being one of the few still functional hospitals in the state of Texas.

They don't say that he is.

They don't say that he isn't, either.

 

His sister comes to see him, which is good. He likes to see a face that doesn't belong to a new doctor, to talk to someone who isn't there to determine whether or not he's still sane, safe to release back into society. (He's not entirely sure that he is. Almost, but not entirely.)

Others follow, as if someone somewhere has stamped a form, allowing him visitors.

Kaneda's wife. Mace's brother. Cassie's parents. Trey's mother.

He tries not to flinch in exchange for their attempts not to show their hatred for him, for surviving when their husband, brother, child did not. Some of them hide it better than others.

It's not unexpected, of course. He understands where they're coming from.

He wonders if this is what drove Pinbacker over the edge: simple survivor's guilt.

(But no, he tells himself, it can't have been that; Pinbacker was crazy already before he and his crew went to the observation deck. It was a collective madness, driven by a single mind at first, perhaps. A contagious kind of crazy, and if he'd caught it from Pinbacker, surely someone would have spotted it by now - except that they don't know the symptoms, can't know the symptoms, must never be told the symptoms.)

 

Only once, a member of the crew from the third Icarus, the one that brought him back home comes to see him. They're neither of them particularly comfortable in each other's company, he thinks - he himself, because she's not Cassie or Cory (a case of survivor's _blame_ , maybe) and she, because she can't see him and not see the seven who didn't make it.

(He tells the doctors he thinks of them often, but it's been too long. He remembers their faces, yes, their names, but when he closes his eyes, he doesn't see their ghosts. He lets them rest in peace, as they deserve.)

 

 _”It's always the same,”_ Cassie told him, once, and she was right.

When he dreams, when he closes his eyes, he sees the sun's surface.

He knows it will probably stay with him until he dies, and then after, forever.


End file.
